Life Goes On

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THE CURRENT CINEMA about “42 Up”, a documentary film directed by Michael Apted... The faces and the stories of the British children in Michael Apted’s ongoing series of documentary films, which began with “7 Up,” in 1964, and has been updated every seven years since then, are so familiar to anyone who has seen one or two of the films that we don’t feel like voyeurs when we watch them; by now, these people are like old acquaintances we can’t wait to see again, to find out what has happened to them... The idea has now gone global: “Up”s have been made in Russia, America, South Africa, Germany, and Japan, and Apted has had a hand in a couple of them. (Apted didn’t actually direct “7 Up”; he was the project’s researcher, and it was his job to choose the children. By the time the next installment—called “Seven Plus Seven”—loomed, the director of “7 Up” had left Granada and Apted had become a director himself, so he took on the task.)... Nice surprises like this have come with greater frequency as the children have grown up, but the first truly astonishing surprise is in “42 Up.” It concerns Neil, who at seven was an adorable, bright-eyed boy living in a middle-class suburb of Liverpool. He wanted to be an astronaut or, failing that, a tour-bus driver: “I’m going to take people to the country and sometimes take them to the seaside, and I’ll have a big loudspeaker.” By “Seven Plus Seven,” Neil’s eyes had gone utterly dead, and he looked fearful. Down the years, his inner darkness seemed only to deepen. He dropped out of Aberdeen University after one term, and since then he has never had a steady job or a place to live. He has been subsisting on Social Security virtually all his adult life, and has drifted from place to place... By thirty-five, he seemed a shell of a person—unbearably sad, and possibly a little dangerous, with his close-shaved head that was missing a few patches of hair, his raggedy clothes, and his closed-off demeanor. When Apted asked him if he thought he was going mad, he said, “I don’t think it—I know it.”... Neil did move to London, and a few years ago he was elected to the local council and has since been reelected. (It’s an unpaid job, so he’s still on the dole.) He also got a B.A. at the Open University, and learned to teach English as a second language. All of this can only be called a miracle, and it fills your heart to the bursting point. And then your heart does burst, when, later in the film, we see a shot of Neil speaking at the wedding of another “Up” participant—Bruce, the soft-spoken, sensitive math teacher from a privileged background (if you can call being sent to boarding school at the age of five privileged). Bruce got married at forty, and Apted, knowing how moving this event would be to view-ers, and no doubt moved by it himself, for the first time violated his policy of not filming his subjects except at seven-year intervals, and sent a camera crew to the event... We have come to care deeply about these people, so we of course wonder what’s in store for them, just as we wonder what’s in store for ourselves, and we can’t help making our own predictions. On the basis of “42 Up,” we have every reason to be optimistic...